[pdftex] PSUtils equivalent for pdftex output.

[John Culleton]

On Tuesday 13 April 2004 11:03 pm, Tigran Aivazian wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Apr 2004, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> > >>>>> "John" == John Culleton <john at wexfordpress.com>
> > >>>>> writes:
> > >>>>>
> >     > and I would prefer something that works with the
> >     > output of pdftex, and not just pdflatex.
> >
> > pdfpages works with the output of ANY program which is
> > able to produce PDF.  It even works with files produced
> > by buggy Adobe programs.
>
> I think what John assumed was that pdfpages package must
> be included in the original .tex sources (and therefore
> implies they have to be also written in pdfLaTeX). This
> is NOT the case, John.
>
> All you need is to write a trivial driver file, like this
> gnt-book.tex:
>
> \documentclass[pdftex,a4paper]{book}
> \usepackage{pdfpages}
> \begin{document}
> \includepdf[pages={-}, signature=32, landscape]{gnt.pdf}
> \end{document}
>
Ah, comes the dawn.  Even I can handle that much LaTeX :-)

The only glitch I see (and it is a trivial one) is that for 
a booklet I need to count the number of output pages and 
then specify the next higher power of four as the signature 
size.  Booklets are single signature beasts. 

There is still the problem of dividing the even sides from 
the odds, which currently I do with psselect. My printer 
doesn't duplex so I use "barnyard" duplexing by printing 
the odd sheets in reverse order, flipping them over, 
reinserting them in the bypass tray and printing the even 
sheets, again in reverse order if I use the bypass feed. 

Currently I just go direct to the printer with PostScript 
(it is a PostScript printer) but I can use apsfilter or its 
equivalent to accept a pdf feed.  

> So, when the file "gnt.pdf" is ready (and produced by
> whatever means, doesn't matter). I run pdflatex
> gnt-book.tex and it generates a new file, gnt-book.pdf
> which contains gnt.pdf rearranged into signatures and
> with two pages combined on a single physical PDF page
> (for printing A5 pages on A4 paper).
>

>
> Btw, in the days when I was converting from PostScript to
> PDF my tnk.pdf file (Hebrew Old Testament) used to be 9M
> and now I generate it directly in pdflatex and the size
> has gone down to just 6.4M, so there are a lot of
> inefficiencies (unnecessary objects etc?) when using
> PostScript and then converting to PDF. I would say always
> generate PDF directly.
>
Interesting. What did you use for conversion---ps2pdf, 
Distiller or what?

> Kind regards
> Tigran
>
>
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-- 
John Culleton
Able Typesetters and Indexers
http://wexfordpress.com